Coral-C

Thanks for your thoughts, @Arianne I ran Goodyear All-Season Vectors all year round on my Mk3 Superb. They were ok and coped adequately with most conditions, albeit with a much lower powered car than I now have. However, two of the set developed a nasty habit of losing pressure and needed frequent top-ups. By the time I got rid of them, it was at least weekly. My garage checked them but could not find any damage or mis-fitting to explain the problem. So I've got a (probably irrational) bias against Goodyears. At the moment, all the UK dealers seem to be out-of-stock of all brands of winter tyres except Continental. Presumably, they will bring new stock in this month as drivers decide it's time to switch over. Like many, I use the summer time clock changes as my cue to swap tyres and consequently late October/early November is when dealers typically aim to have their new stock in. That gives me another few weeks to make my mind up. I don't need snow chains, so I will be on 18" winter rims to give a little bit more width in contact with the road. I saw that a few online dealers do have a good range of tyres available now. Digging further, quite a few seem to be trading names for Delticom, so I appreciate your observations on their service. I'll keep that in my back pocket if nothing turns up here in the meantime. I assume they take care of all the import and tax issues from the EU source, so there are no additional costs or hassle beyond the purchase price.

It's that time of year again when I prepare for winter in the Scottish Highlands. I need to buy a new set of tyres, so I am looking for advice from you about what you prefer to use. I have a spare set of wheels, so I want full winter tyres rather than 'all seasons' that can be swapped out when the season changes. I need tyres that will cope with cold wet conditions and temperatures close to freezing. We often get periods lasting up to a couple of weeks with lying snow on side streets, although the main roads do (eventually) get ploughed. I have the 265PS AWD engine, so there is plenty of power to control. My priority is for safe and comfortable handling rather than performance. Given those requirements, my shortlist is Michelin Pilot Alpin 5 or Pirelli P Zero Winter 2 based on online reviews. Do you have any experience with these or any alternative recommendations? What have you been pleased with, or are there any tyres that you have regretted buying?

After a long run yesterday, I can confirm that my 2025 Mk4 behaves in the same way that @Rifleman reported. Normally, the display only shows the current lane, regardless of how many lanes there are in the road. But when there is slower moving traffic in the outside lane (on the right in the UK), a second lane appears in the display and shows the vehicle. Traffic Assist will reduce your speed to match the slower car and prevent 'undertaking' it. A little tap on the accelerator will override this if you do want to take the risk and break the rules. This works on motorways and on multi-lane trunk roads outside of cities. I haven't noticed within cities, but I don't have many examples around here to test it with.

I have set of 18" wheels for the winter. When they get swapped next month, I'll have the chance to get at the barrels and backs of the Veritates properly. So, fallout decontamination, tar spot removal, and thorough clean. They're already pencilled in with my local bodywork specialist to get ceramic coated after that, which should hopefully make them easier to keep clean going forwards.

Hi @enoktakenokta OTA vehicle updates are restricted in Turkiye because of national regulations, so the 'normal' method of updating is not possible. I did some research with AI and it suggests you can maybe download the raw data files from the VAG update portal and them install them in the car with a USB-C stick. You could try asking ChatGPT or Google AI for help if you want more information. But that still might not work. Can you try your nearest Skoda dealer (or even Audi/VW dealer since it is the same technology) and ask them for help? This must be a common problem in your country, so they must have a standard way to load the updates. Or they could show you how to do it yourself. Good luck. Let us know if you get this fixed.

I've had similar problems on the few occasions that I have tried the park assist. It does seem to work better when there are already parked cars for it to orientate itself against; empty car parks seem less successful. But that may just be my imagination. However ... at a local mini roundabout that I pass each day, the park assist always engages as I pull up to the roundabout and starts to look for parking spaces 🤨

I think I am nearly as excited about this as you 😆 Enjoy your shake-down trip (and then start some new threads about all the quirks you find and need to come to love 😉) I too switched to my first Skoda Superb from Mercedes for all the same reasons as you, and I have never regretted it. True, there is not quite the same 'first class' engineering and customer service, but Skoda is close and on a cost-value comparison wins hands down.

As a ex-programmer, I am astonished at the level of incompetence shown by the current batch of software developers. It is a basic skill of the trade to consider what might go wrong at every step of the update and to gracefully handle it. The 'switch it off and on again' approach might just about be acceptable for a desktop computer. But for a car or other system that completely depends on the software it is utterly unacceptable. I don't think airlines would be happy if they had to switch their jets off and on mid-flight to reset a software glitch 😉 So far, the worst I've had personally is a persistent message on the screen that 'updates are being applied' long after they had finished doing so. I'm dreading getting a more significant failure like yours. Somewhere in this there is a class action lawsuit against VAG brewing for the loss of utility when their shonky software fails. In this case, you could not use the car, had to wait hours for a reboot, and had the costs and inconvenience of getting the garage to help. And you won't be the only person this has happened to. (rant over)

Yes, lane following works and I leave it on. It's not full self-steering - you get about 30 seconds before it tells you to take over steering and automatically disengages. But I do find it useful for those busy moments in dense traffic when you could easily get distracted and drift out of lane. I believe you can have it in stick-shaker mode, where the wheel just vibrates if you are going to leave the lane, but I have it in full lane-following mode. In both cases, there's no intervention if you are indicating to change lane (unless it detects a car in the blind spot). There are mixed reports about it. Some like it, some switch it off. It's more aggressive and twitchy than the old Mk3 but I've seen similar reports from other brands' newer cars. On some urban roads, the wheel will jerk a little from time to time for no apparent reason. And it's not entirely happy if you adjust position within a lane to avoid a pothole or manhole cover. But on motorways and trunk roads, it is very good indeed. Overall, I prefer to leave it on - even around town for normal driving. It's not quite as smooth as the old Mk3's system, but it's perfectly adequate. I think you will find it useful, especially on your long trans-Europe runs.

It works exactly that way (or should I say, it doesn't work). The cruise control would have switched to 60mph and the car would start to slow, requiring a manual override of the cruise setting to keep it at 70. Going down to 60 from 70 is an annoyance, but when it decides you should suddenly be doing 20mph instead it can be a real challenge. Autonomous cruise control was one of the first driver-aid features that I turned off. At the same time, I turned off the map-based 'road layout' speed control. That slows you down as you approach junctions, corners, roundabouts, etc. where the speed limit is going to be too fast for the manoeuvre. It does work, but it is vastly overcautious. It starts to slow you down a long way from the bend AND slows you down much, much, more than you really need. I'm happier manually slowing when I need to and re-engaging cruise control afterwards. In flowing traffic, the car in front slowing will normally do that job for you anyway. So I am left with the Adaptive Cruise Control working pretty much in the same way as my Mk3 did - which suits me just fine. I manually set the speed according to the real speed limit and conditions, and then let it take care of itself. The preferred gap setting on the stalk is great for adjusting the distance between you and the car in front, and seems to be calibrated in seconds (although that is just my suspicion without any documentation to support it) - each extra step on the adjuster adds another 1 second to the gap. Really useful, for example, for dynamically increasing your survival gap in heavy rain or icy conditions. The only downside of the cruise control compared to the Mk3 (in my opinion) is that it takes quite an assertive flick on the stalk to change in 5mph steps; a gentle tap only changes by 1mph. The Mk3 stalk had the gentle tap for 5mph and separate actions for 1mph fine-tuning. With adaptive cruise control you don't need to be fiddling with 1mph tweaks in order to match other traffic; it is normally 5mph changes to align with a new speed limit. Six months in with the new car and I'm still training my muscle-memory to be more firm when adjusting the speed setting. Like many of the driver aids in the Mk4, you'll find that the full predictive cruise control doesn't work as well as you would want it to. It's not all Skoda's fault - the state of the art just isn't there for the autonomous systems to understand what is really going on in the outside world. Defaulting to 'better safe than sorry' is a valid strategy, but it does mean the car will fight you when it doesn't need to. Imagine the world's most nervous back seat driver as your co-pilot and you'll get the idea. Perhaps AI will get it fixed in the future - at which point the Superb's driver aids will be spectacular - but we might have to wait for the Mk5 for that.

I can confirm @FOSTER91 observation. It's a regular problem here in Scotland where some trunk roads still have different speed limits for goods vehicles. I passed this sign on a run along the A90 yesterday and the car immediately switched to 60mph warning. It then happily chimed at me for the next 10 minutes until it finally decided that 70mph was ok.

Thanks for the extensive reply, David. Edinburgh is probably a little too far for me, but @Evolution13 has kindly given me a couple of pointers for recommended Skoda dealers closer to home. My nearest main dealership was adequate when buying a new car, but servicing and after-sales is far from good. Prices quoted randomly got VAT added afterwards, work was done and then needed to be re-done because their 'fix' did not address the actual problem, lack of communication, etc. And don't get me started on their salesman who told me with a completely straight face that he would sell a new L&K 4x4 with all options (i.e. around £55k list price) for well under £40k while we were negotiating a trade-in price 🤨 With my previous car, which I owned for 10 years from new, I gave up on the dealership after 5 years and had all servicing done by a local, non-affiliated, garage who were much better in every way. With the new car, however, I feel I should go back to an official dealership - at least in the early years - to maintain a full 'dealer' service history. The work won't be any better than my local garage would do, but fussy buyers will prefer to see it in the documentation when I come to sell. Hence my search for somewhere I can trust. Also, with the greater level of software in the Mk4 compared to my old Mk3, it probably needs more specialist attention anyway. Skoda seems to be progressively locking down the software systems so that non-approved technicians and owners cannot tinker with the cars. From this forum, I see that there are reports of more things to go wrong with the new models - although many of them seem to be teething problems with the very early Mk4 cars so (fingers-crossed) I may be unaffected. But again, it all points to needing to engage with an official dealer. BTW, I saw that you have the 19" Veritate wheels on Rosie. They look great, but they are a pain to clean because of the limited access behind the spokes and the strange design of the wheel barrel. Take a look at my posts in this forum for a possible solution if you intend to wash them yourself.

That's another option. Maud looks excellent, but Dundee is probably easier for public transport if I need to leave the car with them for any length of time.

That's not a million miles away 😀 I'll check them out. Thanks, @Evolution13

Hi Arianne Just picking up on a sidebar comment in one of your posts... you mentioned that your dealership is "a smaller, family and privately owned franchise as I wanted to avoid the big car dealership groups like Arnold Clark or Lloyd Group". I'm also in Scotland (Highlands rather than the Borders) and have to suffer with a national dealership that is, shall we say, "not excellent". Can you share who your dealer is? Best wishes for Rosie 2 - not long to wait now until you have somewhere to put that USB stick 😉. I recently moved to a 2025 L&K 4x4 and the drive is perfect for me. Rosie will be a joy for your long-haul trans-Europe journeys; Superbs are magnificent on the motorway. I wasn't sure about the massage seats on the L&K, but after a 600-mile-in-a-day run, I wouldn't want to be without them now. And I enjoy the understated power on the rare occasions when you need it: sub-6 seconds to 60mph leaves the boy racers open-jawed at the lights.